MORALE Tool Description: SIRRINE

Name:

Self-Improving Reflective Reasoner Integrating Noteworthy Experience (SIRRINE)

Purpose:

The purpose of the SIRRINE project is to provide a tool for defining software systems capable of reasoning about their own behavior and performance. By creating systems in this way, we support complex learning of new or improved capabilities; a system which understands what it does and how it works can potentially alter itself. A variety of applications of such a tool are apparent. Two such applications we have focused on are:

Description:

The overall paradigm that SIRRINE operates under describes learning as a kind of design task; a reasoner is viewed as an abstract device and the learning process involves redesign of the device. Some of the advantages of this approach include

Our view of reasoning agents as devices leads us to the hypothesis that reasoning can be formulated as the combination and interaction of different reasoning components, i.e. primitive building blocks of cognition which occur in a wide variety of different strategies for different problems. In past projects, we have observed evidence of such patterns which we refer to as generic learning tasks and generic learning strategies . The ultimate objective of the SIRRINE project is to develop a taxonomy of these generic reasoning components and how they can be combined. We expect that by analyzing a variety of individual problems (such as meeting scheduling) we will be able to observe a wide variety of these patterns of functionality. To the extent that we do, these patterns will then constitute a concrete theory of how reasoning and reflection can occur.

Status:

The current version of SIRRINE is SIRRINE2 Version 1.0. This version is available for downloading:

Operating System Dependencies:

SIRRINE2 consists of a set of core features plus optional packages to interface with VisEd and ACMEServer. The core features run under both SunOS 4.1 and Solaris. The optional interface packages only run on Solaris.

Platform Dependencies:

We believe that any platform capable of supporting the OS and COTS dependencies (q.v.) would provide adequate support for SIRRINE.

COTS Dependencies:

SIRRINE2 requires Harlequin LispWorks 3.2.2 or later and Tcl/Tk 8.0 or later.

Other Dependencies:

The optional interface features require several non-commerical software components: Expect 5.26 or later, VisEd, and ACMEServer, plus the further dependencies that those systems introduce.

Documentation:

Point of Contact:

J. William Murdock

College of Computing
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
murdock@cc.gatech.edu